During an unusually hot summer, some crews at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state are sweating through their protective clothing, according to federal safety reports.
Hanford workers at the Liquid Effluent Retention Facility experienced some incidents of contamination during June and July after management modified requirements for personal protective equipment (PPE) as high temperatures in the high-desert site topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, according to staff reports filed with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
The National Weather Service forecast for the Richland, Wash., area Friday finally calls for some relief from the blistering heat with daytime highs in the 80s and 90s through Tuesday.
A June 25 DNFSB report to the board’s technical director, Christopher Roscetti, said a worker for the tank contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, had contamination on personal clothing after removing the day’s PPE and the “the worker noted he had sweated through his coveralls.”
A somewhat revised set of PPE layers failed to totally solve the problem, according to a DNFSB report dated July 2. Two workers doing chores in the facility’s Basin 44 also experienced some contamination: one on the bottom of their shoe, and one on their wrist.
Finally, in a July 9 report, the board’s staff said Hanford managers believe they have struck upon the right combination of protective clothing and altered work practices to minimize contamination.
“The revised ensemble includes a more impermeable coverall with extra sets of waterproof shoe covers, a rain bib, arm-sleeves, and muck boots,” according to the report. The work start time has been moved earlier in the day, to reduce heat stress also.
Hanford’s Liquid Effluent Retention Facility is part of the Effluent Treatment Facility that removes radioactive and other hazardous contaminants from wastewater at the complex.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
The president of United Steelworkers Local 1-689 and his members are pressing the Department of Energy and lawmakers to focus more on potential future uses of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, including advanced nuclear fuel and potential recovery of nickel.
“Right now, the mission at Portsmouth is to tear it all down,” Herman Potter, Local 1-689 president, said in a July press release. “You have to change missions and establish new projects in order to keep people working. The majority of the workforce is doing decontamination and decommissioning work. Once the buildings are down, there’s no jobs.”
In a conversation last week with Weapons Complex Monitor, Potter said both Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and William “Ike” White, the acting chief of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, seem receptive toward the union’s desire for reindustrialization of the site formerly used for uranium enrichment for nuclear fuel — initially for national defense and later for nuclear power reactors.
Currently a member of the House of Representatives, Ryan is also a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who does not plan to run again in November 2022.
Potter and Local 1-689 vice president Tom Lamerson have used June and July meetings Ryan and White to urge continued Congressional funding for Centrus Energy’s high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) enrichment facility at Portsmouth.
Under a $115-million cost-sharing pilot project with DOE, Centrus is scheduled to construct a 16-machine enrichment cascade at Portsmouth for HALEU. Costs are running higher than expected, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the White House budget request. The National Nuclear Security Administration whether to use Centrus’ technology to help fuel future nuclear weapons work.
The union is also interested in a nickel recovery project at Portsmouth, although that would require reversal of an existing moratorium enacted by former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
